Quite possibly the most charming film I’ve seen since Big Fish, and that’s saying something. Let me warn you though, this film is incredibly vulgar, filled with cursing and references to all kinds of stuff kids don’t need to see. While the plot reads like a standard family road trip comedy, Little Miss Sunshine is brutally honest in its portrayal as to how screwed up people can be.A family puts all their effort into making sure little Olive gets to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, because it is her biggest dream to do so. Then comes the quirkiness. Olive’s parents are strapped for money and fight a good bit. Her mom is neurotic and over-worked, while her dad is a failure at trying to sell his motivational self-help series. Her brother is a Nietzsche reading artsy-fartsy type who has taken a vow of silence until he achieves his goal of becoming a jet pilot. Grandpa just got kicked out of the old folks home for snorting heroin and manages to fill in those silent moments with a barrage of obscenities. Finally, there’s Uncle Frank- a gay Proust scholar who recently botched a suicide attempt after learning that his ex-boyfriend is now dating the guy that beat him out for a prestigious grant.
After discovering that Olive has gotten a chance to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant the family loads up into a rickety VW Bus and heads off on a journey you’ll never forget. No matter how hard you may try.
Some liken it to National Lampoon’s Vacation, except that Sunshine is darker and presents plenty more obstacles in the family’s way before they can get where they’re going both literally (the pageant) and as a family. It seems to me that the graveness of some of the things they encounter provides the balance that many family road trip films lack. Sure, there are plenty of clichéd, been-there-done-that scenarios, but Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t give in to the sappiness of those clichés. Instead, they bludgeon them to death with the right mix of dead-pan humor, bleakness and obscenity to elevate those clichés to a new level of comedy.
There are plenty of laughs in this film. The complete and utter lack of rationality in some of the choices that are made are so absurd that you can’t help but laugh. Then there are the inappropriate laughs, which you know shouldn’t be funny but are anyway. That’s the real secret to this film’s formula of success. Portraying situations that would be treated as a somber moment in other family trip films, effectively killing the humor for a moment of sap, but then throwing compounding amounts of absurdity on top of it to break the norm.
Raunchy, obscene good fun abounds in this film but the cursing is a bit too casual, which held Little Miss Sunshine back in my ratings scale. If the vulgarity had been toned down just a smidge, I might have supported this film for Best Picture at the Oscars. While it is certainly an excellent movie and one of the best of the year, I hesitate to declare it THE best of the year.
Definitely watch this film. It’ll warm your heart and warp your mind.
RATING: 3.75 out of 5
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